Chapter Twenty-Seven
CHURCH CAME TWO mornings after the best night of my life, and I sat down at that table already knowing it was going to take something back.
That’s how my luck runs. I get one good thing in both hands and somewhere a bill starts coming due, and I’d felt this one riding me since breakfast, low and mean in my gut, so by the time Bolt shut the chapel door and Devil dropped the gavel, I was already locked for the hit.
Mystic had a folder in front of him. That was wrong for a start. Mystic doesn’t carry paper, Mystic carries it all in his head. If there’s paper on the table it means he wanted it in front of the rest of us, wanted us reading it with our own eyes, and that’s never once been good.
“Mystic ran Amy’s history,” Devil said. “Everybody listen. This is the one that matters.” He sat back. “Go on.”
He just put one finger on the folder and left it there. “Took a while,” he said. “She come to us with nothin’. Name, age, not much else. Dawson don’t narrow shit down, so I had to go all the way back. Found the birth certificate.”
“And?” Chain, leaning in.
“Mother’s dead. Years now. Drank herself there.” He paused, not for effect, because Mystic didn’t do anything for effect. Words just came out of him slow. “Father’s alive.”
Something cold moved through me.
“Name’s Cal Rickard.”
Plain name. Could’ve belonged to a plumber, a schoolteacher, some man who waved at you over the fence on Saturday morning while he washed his truck.
Instead it belonged to the sick fuck who hurt Amy.
Nobody else at the table knew that. I watched the name pass around and land nowhere, watched Gearhead shake his head, Chain glance toward Bolt, and I sat there with my hands flat on the wood and kept my face like stone, because I’d known this bastard for weeks without having anything to call him.
“Don’t know him,” Gearhead said.
“No reason you would.” Mystic opened the folder.
“Did five years on aggravated assault. Charges started uglier. Plea made ’em prettier.
” His eyes lifted then, and there was a thing Mystic could do with those mismatched eyes, just let them go flat and empty, that could suck the warmth straight out of a room.
“Ran his family about how you’d expect a man like that to run one. ”
Nobody asked him to explain.
“Got out six weeks ago.”
Six fucking weeks.
The radiator. The garage. The campus. Six weeks of a hard man out and circling, and I felt the thing start to line up under the table.
“That’s your man on the campus,” Devil said. “That’s who the boy saw.”
“Prison ink on his throat,” I said, first I’d spoken since sitting down. My voice came out rough enough that Devil’s eyes cut to me. “Sawyer said some kind of animal. Dark. Blown out. Looked homemade.”
Mystic looked at me. Held it a second. “Yeah,” he said. “About that.”
Hard gray bastard with a buzzed head, thick through the neck and shoulders, lines cut deep around a mouth that looked like it had forgotten how to do anything but go mean.
Even staring straight into a county camera there wasn’t anything uncertain in him, no shame, no nerves, nothing that said he’d just had his freedom taken away. Sawyer had gotten that part dead right.
Nobody said anything for a second.
Then Chain said, “The hell is that?”
“Tiger, looks like,” Gearhead said. “Homemade. Ugly.”
“It’s nothin’.” Mystic didn’t even look at it. “Man did a lot of years. You come out of a place like that wearin’ whatever the yard put on you. Don’t mean he’s anybody’s but his own.” His eyes came up. “He ain’t Dragon Fire, if that’s where you’re headed. He ain’t anybody’s. He’s just a con.”
“Then how’s it related to Drago?” Chain asked.
“Because he spent nineteen days next to him.” Mystic set the photo face down, done with it. “That’s the how.”
He let it sit.
“Broad River,” he said. “Rickard’s last stretch. Same block they held Drago after the raid, before the feds moved him.” Mystic stopped to let it sink in. “Same cell. Nineteen days, the two of ’em, right before Rickard walked out a free man.”
“Same cell,” I said, more to myself than anybody else.
Chain sat back. “Fuck me.”
Gearhead swore under his breath, and I looked down at the photograph in the middle of the table and felt the pieces start moving before Mystic even finished laying them out.
“Rickard walks after that?” Bolt asked.
“Nineteen days later.” Mystic closed the folder halfway. “Walks out broke. No job. No wife. No family that’ll claim him. Parole address is a room over a garage owned by a cousin he ain’t talked to in eight years.”
Devil’s face changed. “Drago had money.”
Mystic nodded once.
“And needed somebody outside,” Bolt said.
Another nod.
Chain leaned forward, forearms hitting the table. “Somebody without a patch.”
“There you go.”
Devil sat back slowly, looking at the photograph. “Disposable.”
“Clean,” Mystic corrected. “Least from Drago. Rickard gets caught, there’s nothin’ tying him to Dragon Fire. No patch, no history, no calls before prison, nothin’. He’s just some hard old con who got out and went back to doing hard old con shit.”
“You got money changing hands?” I asked.
Mystic shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Calls?”
“Not yet.”
“Then we’re guessing,” I said.
“We’re adding,” Devil replied.
I looked at him.
He tapped the table once with a finger. “Drago’s sitting in a cell with a man who’s nineteen days from freedom.
He’s got money, he’s got a woman he wants taken back, and he’s got Mystic sitting here breathing when he’d rather he wasn’t.
Rickard walks out with nothing waiting on him.
Six weeks later he’s in Charleston circling this club and Amy.
” Devil’s eyes went to Mystic. “You know the contract?”
“No. But I’d bet my patch on the way of it. Zeynep brought back. Mystic dead. Maybe both, maybe more if he gets the chance.”
“One man?” Gearhead asked.
“One man nobody sees coming,” Devil said. “We been looking for Dragon Fire patches, known associates, vehicles, faces. This bastard could’ve walked past every one of us at a gas station and we’d never have looked twice.”
That sat ugly.
Because he already had.
He’d stood forty feet from me on a college campus while I watched Amy laugh over coffee, and he’d followed her through Charleston with me sitting right there.
He’d gotten close enough to put a hole in her radiator, close enough to stand in a parking garage and put her on the concrete with one look, and every man on this property had spent those same weeks facing the other direction because we’d been waiting on Drago to send one of his own.
He hadn’t.
He’d bought himself a stranger.
“That’s who’s been circling us,” Mystic said. “Not one of Drago’s soldiers. Hired hand. Man with no patch and nothin’ to lose.”
Around the table, everybody shifted as the answer sunk in.
Chain swore again. Gearhead sat back and rubbed his jaw.
Bolt looked toward Devil, already moving ahead to whatever came next, and I could damn near feel the room locking onto the reality of it because finally there was one, Drago, Broad River, Rickard, nineteen days in a cell, money, contract.
It fit. That was the problem. It fit everything except the one thing that mattered most to me.
I stared at Cal Rickard’s face lying upside down in the middle of the table and heard Mystic’s words again.
They still thought this was all about Zeynep, they didn’t know the full extent of why Cal Rickard would come for Amy.
“That’s not all of it.”
The room shut up.
Devil’s eyes came to mine. “What?”
I reached across the table and turned the booking photo until Cal Rickard was facing me. “That bastard wants Amy back and the reason isn’t one I can give you freely, it’s not mine to give, but let’s just say he’s one sick motherfucker.”
Nobody answered, but understanding was written all over their faces.
“We have to get rid of him before he manages to get her back.”
Devil had gone still.
So had Mystic.
And I saw it happen around the table, the answer we’d all been so damn relieved to have opening back up and showing us the hole right through the middle of it.
“We keep Amy safe.” Devil’s eyes came to me and stayed.
“Starting now. She doesn’t leave this compound.
Not for school, not for air, not for anything.
That’s done. And she’s never in a room without one of us in it, and at night — ” he stopped.
Looked at me a half second longer. “At night she’s where she’s been. With Rune.”
“She know?” Chain asked. “Any of it? Who’s out there?”
“No,” I said. Too fast. Every eye came back to me. “No. She doesn’t — she knows there’s a man watching. She doesn’t know it’s — ” I couldn’t say it. Her father. I couldn’t get it out at that table. “She doesn’t know who.”
“She’s gotta be told somethin’,” Mystic said.
“I agree. She’s gotta be told she can’t leave and there’s a man out there wants to hurt her,” Devil said. “She doesn’t have to be handed every piece of it in one sitting.” He straightened. “Rune tells her what keeps her alive. The rest keeps.”
* * *
I didn’t go straight back to the cabin.
I stood out in the yard a while first, in the heat, and got my face right, because she’d read it the second she saw me, she reads everything, and I couldn’t walk in there with two months of the world ending on my face and a girl waiting in my cabin who trusted me all the way down.
Her father. The thing she goes screaming from in her sleep. Out there past the treeline right now, wanting her, working toward her. And me the only wall left between them.
I didn’t need God for the promise I made standing there, and I didn’t need pretty words for it either.
Cal Rickard was never putting his hands on that girl again.
Not while I had breath in me, and if he came through those gates, or came anywhere near her outside them, he was going to find out there were things I knew how to do that had nothing to do with what grew in my garden.
I let that settle.
Then I looked down the path toward the cabin where Amy was waiting for me, and that was the harder part, because Rickard wasn’t the only thing standing between us now.
I knew who her father was. I knew what he’d done. I knew enough of the thing she’d trusted Brenda to bury that if Amy ever found out how I got it, she’d have every right to look at me and see one more man who’d taken something that belonged to her without asking.
And I still wasn’t going to tell her.
Not that part.
I got my face right and started down the path, going home to tell the woman I loved that we’d found the man watching her, while keeping to myself the one thing that would tell her I knew exactly why, and I hated it.
I did it anyway.